It is amazing that the ACLU will always worry about the bad side of something new no matter what the good side can provide. They are now afraid of the use of tear gas or tazers being used from an unmanned plane or drone. They don't care if this tool may help stop a riot and save the lives of police officers and civilians by having better and wider coverage of a trouble zone. They just fear the "new" and "unknown".

I guess they would rather have hundreds of police on the ground and dozens of manned helicopters taking care of business. The shear number of humans caught up in a high tension situation along with multiple million dollar aircraft in a confined location seems so much more safer to me then a smaller number of ground based police and a few low cost drones.

It's nothing more than fear of the unknown and the paranoid feelings that big brother is watching.

I am on the line on my feelings, I fly FPV to have fun and to do amature AP, and maybe do pro AP once all the hoops are known, and I support anyone else doing the same, but it becomes a different thing when you attach weapons, lethal or non-lethal to one, it's also different to fly around LOOKING for someone doing wrong. Eventually police will have drones with license plate scanners and other sensors just flying over the roads looking for cars with warrents, speeders, etc. Also in 2015 it will be required that all new model vehicles have black boxes... imagine what it means if a drone is capable of reading the black box while it flies over you, now they can fgure out everywhere anyone has been very easily.

I am a privacy advocate, I do not want police or military having drones, but it is going to happen anyway so I feel they should be as limited as possible with them. I feel they should only use them for active purposes, not just flying around looking for problems, and espially not armed, and unless there is a warrent or something it should be completely inadmissible in court any data recorded from a drone.

One thing people try to say is what is the difference between a plane or helicopter vs a drone, true that a drone could be used in the same fashions, but drones can also get in a LOT closer then a real heli or plane can, which can give astonishingly good video and other data. Face it, a police heli isn't going to be able to hover just outside your window and look in, a quad copter or other UAV heli would have no problems doing so.

In one hand I am glad to see the technology advancing, in the other I see the American concept of civil liberties dissappearing faster then the speed of sound.

You forget far too easily how the police tend to overuse and suffer from scope-creep with all their new toys, from using tasers as compliance devices (NOT their intended function!) to pulling out the SWAT team to run a non-violent arrest warrant (and then they go to the wrong house and shoot a chained dog).

The police are rapidly forgetting their mission and who they are supposed to be protecting in this country, and I for one will attempt to down any armed police drone I ever see, now to the day I die.

I wonder how it will be when police have much more confidence and time in with messing with the early drone technology, because by then they will have a good understanding of how FPV works too, and will KNOW very well if you are flying illegally in any way, will be sharing airspace (remember in most countries HAM and as well as public frequencies are subject to be secondary uses of a bandwidth, so a police drone would come first in airspace before your amature / hobby craft which will now limit your ability to FPV as well, espially if you are in a town that has local LEO with drones.).

You forget far too easily how the police tend to overuse and suffer from scope-creep with all their new toys, from using tasers as compliance devices (NOT their intended function!) to pulling out the SWAT team to run a non-violent arrest warrant (and then they go to the wrong house and shoot a chained dog).

The police are rapidly forgetting their mission and who they are supposed to be protecting in this country, and I for one will attempt to down any armed police drone I ever see, now to the day I die.

Dave

Dave

I do not condone the misuse of technology that unfortunately has happened more than a few times. As I mentioned before a sword has two sides and two uses both good and bad.

To keep a tool out of the hands of those people that can use it for the good because it can also be used for the bad is misguided. What if those same people that are always worried about the "bad" side decided that cars are way too dangerous for people. They would vote for everyone to use a bicycle or take mass transportation. That's idiocy.

These are the same people that are worried that tazing a suspect may hurt or kill them even though it has been used more than the majority of the times to safely subdue a violent person without injury. Would it be better if the police did not have the tazer as a tool and the only way to subdue a violent person is to shoot them. Yeah. That makes real sense to me.

If you feel the police in this country are abusing their toys to the point that you would shoot down one of their drones then I would say it is people like you that have raised the stakes which requires the police to sometimes go overboard to fight crime.

Maybe I'm the only person that feels this way. But I also feel that if you feel you are being wrongly subjugated then there is the door. Go find yourself a place where you think it is better than here.

If you feel the police in this country are abusing their toys to the point that you would shoot down one of their drones then I would say it is people like you that have raised the stakes which requires the police to sometimes go overboard to fight crime.

Maybe I'm the only person that feels this way. But I also feel that if you feel you are being wrongly subjugated then there is the door. Go find yourself a place where you think it is better than here.

Yeah, you are the only person that feels this way. Nobody trusts cops anymore except for the truly ignorant.

Also thanks for the moronic "love it or leave it" routine. Truly the spirit of American democracy there!

I am on the line on my feelings, I fly FPV to have fun and to do amature AP, and maybe do pro AP once all the hoops are known, and I support anyone else doing the same, but it becomes a different thing when you attach weapons, lethal or non-lethal to one, it's also different to fly around LOOKING for someone doing wrong. Eventually police will have drones with license plate scanners and other sensors just flying over the roads looking for cars with warrents, speeders, etc. Also in 2015 it will be required that all new model vehicles have black boxes... imagine what it means if a drone is capable of reading the black box while it flies over you, now they can fgure out everywhere anyone has been very easily.

I am a privacy advocate, I do not want police or military having drones, but it is going to happen anyway so I feel they should be as limited as possible with them. I feel they should only use them for active purposes, not just flying around looking for problems, and espially not armed, and unless there is a warrent or something it should be completely inadmissible in court any data recorded from a drone.

One thing people try to say is what is the difference between a plane or helicopter vs a drone, true that a drone could be used in the same fashions, but drones can also get in a LOT closer then a real heli or plane can, which can give astonishingly good video and other data. Face it, a police heli isn't going to be able to hover just outside your window and look in, a quad copter or other UAV heli would have no problems doing so.

In one hand I am glad to see the technology advancing, in the other I see the American concept of civil liberties dissappearing faster then the speed of sound.

You say all this like it hasn't been happening for the last 80 years.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Eagle202

It is amazing that the ACLU will always worry about the bad side of something new no matter what the good side can provide. They are now afraid of the use of tear gas or tazers being used from an unmanned plane or drone. They don't care if this tool may help stop a riot and save the lives of police officers and civilians by having better and wider coverage of a trouble zone. They just fear the "new" and "unknown".

Reminds me a bit of the AMA, complete with misguidance and incomplete understanding.